The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

When your enjoyment of a thing depends significantly on the inability of other people to enjoy that thing, you probably need psychiatric help and shouldn't be allowed to implement policy regarding that thing.

They rounded the foot of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, and there was the Message written in blazing letters along the crest of the Mountain. There was a little observation vantage point with a rail built along the top of a large rock facing it, from which you could get a good view. It had a little pay-telescope for looking at the letters in detail, but no one would ever use it because the letters burned with the divine brilliance of the heavens and would, if seen through a telescope, have severely damaged the retina and optic nerve.

I always liked the SDF-1's Space Fold Tech because it was such an important plot point in the Robotech Saga and I've always thought it was more plausible than Han Solo's space-contracting hyperdrive that somehow shrank the Kessel Run to 12 parsecs and with a better explicated mechanism than the Enterprise's warp drive with arbitrary warp factor settings.

The POTUS likens curing cancer to the moonshot. The thing is, cancer isn't a single disease, it's a collection of heterogenous, vaguely-related diseases that have multiple causative effects, widely varying pathophysiology, and widely different prognoses.

Despite the well-documented existence of systemic/institutionalized racism that exists as a superset of overt racism, many naive antagonists still retort with "anyone can be racist regardless of skin color" as a way to deflect criticism of inherently racist structures.

Anthropomorphizing (theomorphizing?) the free market is insane. The Invisible Hand is just a metaphor for the summation of stochastic processes appearing to have intentionality to the apophenia-susceptible human mind, not a metaphysical description of an actual sapient system really having intentionality. #ChurchOfTheAlmightyDollar

I was unaware that "super-earth" has a specific (although still informal) definition, roughly, a planet with a mass greater than Earth but less than a gas giant in the Sol system (i.e., less massive than Uranus or Neptune).

In Star Wars, the State is the enemy and the Rebellion is a libertarian/anarchocapitalist-religious fundamentalist utopia that glorifies asymmetric warfare/terrorism while in Star Trek, the State is a (mostly) benevolent democratic socialist utopia that emphasizes diplomacy and peacemaking.

I find it funny that the thing the scientific method and quantum physics and biology taught me is that duality, diversity, plurality is reality. There isn't one right answer to anything. Reductionism can be useful, but it's not reality. And anyone who says it is is trying to sell you something.

It's funny how people use the example of Copernicus and the heliocentric model as the archetype for scientific progress. The fact of the matter is that, at least initially, Ptolemy's geocentric model actually still made more accurate predictions.

I don't understand the math well enough to actually know, but isn't the reason why we even have a wave-particle duality because not only do we lack the precise language to describe the things that are waves-and-particles, but we also lack the precise equations to describe things as simultaneously waves-and-particles?

I honestly don't understand why everyone uses exponential curves for their models when sigmoidal curves seem to better model reality for lots of phenomena: population growth, language change, diffusion of innovation… and perhaps even the growth of capitalist economies.

If it's dry, moisten it. If it's moist, dry it. If you're not on steroids, start using them. If you are on steroids, stop taking them. — almost everything I learned about dermatology, taught to me by a general surgeon

As I grew frustrated with wrestling with Foursquare's bizarre password reset system that either kept asking me for the password that I couldn't remember or asking me to log in first, I got to pondering:

Apparently, the only thing mosquitoes are really good at is spreading disease. Anything they do (pollination, serving as food for birds and fish) can be done by other species who don't bite humans and drink human blood.